Xbox is offline, just days after the PlayStation outage
Xbox went offline shortly after PlayStation simultaneously went down, further fueling concerns about Sony’s planned all-digital future. The Xbox outage has now lasted several hours and appears to have worsened since the first reports surfaced late in the evening of July 26.
At 7:54 AM ET, the official Xbox Support Twitter account wrote: “We just wanted to check in on the issue with the game library, signing in, and launching games. We know this has been going on for a while and thank you for your patience while our teams continue to work on it.”
Xbox outage affects both digital and disc-based games
The status page confirms a “major outage” affecting the “Account and Profile, Store and Subscriptions, Games and Gaming, and Apps and Mobile Devices” features. At 9:43 AM ET, support stated that the issue had been identified in all four areas and a solution was in progress. According to Microsoft tracking, these outages were first reported around 11:10 PM ET on July 26.
“You may experience issues such as being unable to log in to your profile, the connection being interrupted during login, or other related problems,” reads a support notice. “Features that require login, such as most games, apps, and social activities, will be unavailable.”
This also applies to searching for specific games in the store, opening apps, and, yes, “you may currently be experiencing problems playing your digital games.” As always, any blow to physical games is bad for everyone, regardless of whether you actually buy discs or not. Ironically, Xbox prices only increased for the third time this year last month.
